Air Force relaunches combat squadrons

Many Air Force combat squadrons resumed flying Monday after being grounded by sequestration in April, but the service warned its long-term funding problems still are not solved.

The $208 million program restoration affects the combat air forces from multiple commands and follows Congress’s reprogramming of about $1.8 billion earlier this year. Flight training for pilots, navigators, flight crews, mission crews and maintainers has been restored for the next 2½ months, through Oct. 1.

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Air Force officials did not hail the program restoration Monday but called it a “first step” on a climb to recovery for units whose readiness has declined precipitously since being temporarily shuttered in April.

“Our country counts on the U.S. Air Force to be there when needed — in hours or days, not weeks or months,” said Gen. Mike Hostage, the head of Air Combat Command. “A fire department doesn’t have time to ‘spin up’ when a fire breaks out, and we don’t know where or when the next crisis will break out that will require an immediate Air Force response.”

The Pentagon’s two popular flight demonstration teams, the Air Force’s Thunderbirds and the Navy’s Blue Angels, have been maintaining basic readiness since April but haven’t been performing because of sequestration. A spokesman for the Air Force said Monday that reprogramming does not mean air show performances are back on — in fact, it only allows the Thunderbirds to resume flying in anticipation of possibly resuming limited performances in 2014.

Budget uncertainty still lingers, Hostage said, and though Monday’s announcement gets some of the force through the rest of fiscal 2013, the funding for the program has not been guaranteed for upcoming fiscal years.

“This decision gets us through the next several months but not the next several years,” Hostage said.

“The Air Force is cutting hundreds of millions of dollars from important programs so that it can continue to fund the minimum acceptable amount of training for combat squadrons,” McCain said. “This status quo cannot be maintained without inflicting serious and growing harm to other critical Department of Defense programs.”

McCain repeated his call for President Barack Obama and fellow members of Congress to undo sequestration. And his fellow Senate Armed Services Committee Republican, Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, did the same — blaming Obama for rejecting Inhofe’s plan to give flexibility on sequester cuts to military branches.

“The president chose politics over the needs of our warfighters and issued a veto threat of my bill … the president did so at the cost of our military and civilian personnel and their families, who continue to bear the brunt of the fiscal uncertainty,” Inhofe said. “Now the Air Force will also have to compensate for the additional costs of neglected maintenance and training required to return our aircrews and aircraft to mission ready status.”